It's a difficult problem to consider, given that everyone speaks freely in global forums, and you end up with cultural exchange on an individual level... but you also have to think geopolitically.

A country is free to drop bombs on itself (the US does this regularly at test ranges)

A country is _not_ free to drop bombs on other countries... that's war.

If your country is not in control of its territory, it is not a country. It's some other country, the one that's in control of the territory.

If your country is not in control of its own media, then some other country is. And that country will use that power to its advantage, including destroying your country.

You have to use military superiority (and of course diplomacy, but it's backed by force) to keep other countries from freely dropping bombs on your country whenever they like.

You use customs, surveillance and barricades to control the flow of goods, people, capital across your borders - and if you don't, you don't control your borders, someone else does. Are you really the government of this territory, or is it in fact your neighbour?

You use licensing, regulators, standards, media ownership rules, etc. to hold your own broadcasters accountable for what they transmit to people, and also to clamp down on propaganda broadcasts controlled by other countries. You _used_ to be able to see Russia Today (RT) on regular TV, but since it acted as the mouthpiece of Russia, insisting Russia's not at war with Ukraine, etc., it was banned. If it were to start being independent of Russia and start reporting the truth, it would have a chance of being unbanned.

The great difficulty of social media is that it's not even "a country" operating it, it's usually "a corporation" (in the case of TikTok, China exerts an oversized influence on the company running the service, much more than the US exerts on Twitter or Russia exerts on Telegram, so we're mostly back to "a country" is running TikTok specifically)... and while the individuals on social media networks are (to some extent) real people with individual opinions, the specific opinions _allowed_ on these networks are controlled by that corporation. And users of those networks really just want to see things they've subscribed to, in the order of posting, but instead those networks are flexing their power over the user and pushing recommendations at their eyeballs, ultimately making themselves arbiters of what's popular, what's spreading, what ideas are being pushed. And that's horrendous for any country, in the same way that letting another country control your media is horrendous. If Elon Musk were to say "let's all have a knife fight in the middle of your city, wouldn't that be cool!" and have that appear in every Twitter user's timeline... I suspect a non-zero number of knife fights would break out across the world. That's _power_, and it's power that nobody in your country has a say in.

We can't even necessarily _stop_ this cross-cultural contamination... in the UK we talk about idiots who want to "plead the fifth" (we're not the USA, we don't have a "fifth amendment", we have a right to silence), and one of our cringiest moments was British protestors chanting "don't shoot me" to unarmed British police. Those protestors were totally filled with USian brainworms. This is happening because one of our biggest problems is US cultural hegemony steamrollering over our own. Our citizens are engaging primarily with US media, US-owned services like Youtube, and US controlled social media networks (Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, etc.) and they're exposed to an outsized number of US-based English speakers with their US-centric opinions.

Your country has a problem if masses of its citizens are more au fait with another country's culture, laws and societal norms than they are with their own.

It's swings and roundabouts. On the one hand, I do admire the USA's commitment to freedom of speech, and projects like Wikipedia benefit from being hosted there, because the people in control of it then use that legal freedom to try and remain open, uncensored and neutral. But I can't say the same for Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Amazon, Apple and so on.